NASA have announced partnerships with Boeing and SpaceX to return manned mission launches to the USA. Currently they rely on the Russian space agency, after the Space Shuttle program was shelved. "Thanks to the leadership of President Obama, the hard work of our NASA and industry teams, and support from Congress, today we are one step closer to launching our astronauts from U.S. soil on American spacecraft and ending the nation’s sole reliance on Russia by 2017. Turning over low-Earth orbit transportation to private industry will also allow NASA to focus on an even more ambitious mission – sending humans to Mars."

There's a new Android security issue. A bug quietly reported on September 1 appears to have grave implications for Android users. Android Browser, the open source, WebKit-based browser that used to be part of the Android Open Source Platform (AOSP), has a flaw that enables malicious sites to inject JavaScript into other sites. Those malicious JavaScripts can in turn read cookies and password fields, submit forms, grab keyboard input, or do practically anything else.

Tech Report look at some clever SSD caching in a new Micron unit. Dubbed dynamic write acceleration (DWA), this switching occurs at the block level. Incoming writes are written in SLC mode before being moved to MLC storage during lulls in activity. All unused NAND is available to this effective write cache, which stretches across both user-accessible storage and overprovisioned area.

FOTW spotted Doom running on a printer. Sometimes, the only way to attract attention to dire warnings about weaknesses in a particular system is to exploit them in a way that can't be ignored. That's what drove Michael Jordon of Context Information Security to make Doom run on a Canon Pixma printer; not because it's cool (although it clearly is) but to demonstrate the inherent insecurities in Canon's wireless printers.

Tweaktown have their Intel Developer Forum coverage posted. Steven visited this year's Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco and saw plenty of cool technology. If you couldn't make the show, get an overview here.

A Chinese city has opened a phone lane, for pedestrians texting and walking. In Chongqing, China, with a degree of seriousness that has yet to be determined, the city authorities have designated a 30 metre (100ft) “cellphone lane” for people who use their phones while walking. “First mobile phone sidewalks in China,” declares a notice next to it. Seems likely to be a joke.

TechSpot have an Intel Z97 Motherboard Roundup. Codenamed 'Wildcat Point', the Z97 chipset brings support for future Broadwell CPUs, along with SATA Express and the M.2 socket. With over 90 designs available right now, picking the right one can be a difficult decision. Hoping to narrow the search down, we have taken seven popular boards and compared them in every way possible.

The word "metadata" has been doing the rounds lately - a Dutch study has shown how much information can be found in it. As author and researcher Door Hans de Zwart of Dutch digital rights foundation Bits of Freedom noted, even recently, on its website, the Dutch Intelligence Agency (AIVD) downplayed the interception of metadata as "a minor infringement of privacy". Thanks to a Dutch man, Ton Siedsma, we now have a glimpse of the type of information that can be squeezed from what officials would have us believe is "just" metadata.